Jillian Keiley has literally dived right in to her new role as the NAC’s artistic director

When someone starts a new job, it’s usually just a cliché to say they have to dive right in and get their feet wet. For Jillian Keiley, the new artistic director of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, the dive-in was literal: her first production with the company is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a show that is staged largely underwater.

“We were rehearsing in a swimming pool,” she says. “I had to put on a snorkel and direct under the water.”

In the final product, actors perform scenes in what is essentially a gigantic aquarium, so Keiley needed to be able to see the action from head-on.

Although Keiley is no stranger to water in her work (“I’ve directed something like four plays about shipwrecks,” she says, musing about how that might have something to do with being from St. John’s), this is the first time she has actually been submerged during a work day.

All jokes about getting her feet wet aside, Keiley is excited about the new gig.

“I had this fantasy about how it was going to be in Ottawa, with everyone skating on the canal every day,” she says over the phone from her office at the NAC, which doesn’t overlook the canal, but does face a mirrored building in which she can see the reflection of the canal (unfortunately she hasn’t seen any skaters yet).

Keiley, the founding artistic director of acclaimed Newfoundland theatre company Artistic Fraud, won the 2004 Siminovitch Prize for directing, one of the country’s most prestigious theatre awards (the jury called her work “startlingly original and radically imaginative”). The announcement last winter that she would be taking over the NAC’s English Theatre from Peter Hinton was greeted with enormous enthusiasm, and Keiley has been hard at work trying to live up to the hype.

She appreciates that the NAC faces a unique challenge: it’s a national theatre with a local address. “We’ve got a national mandate, but a local audience,” she says. “And being from the ‘outer colonies,’ I’m interested in that national role: How do we spin out this giant box of concrete into communities across the country?”

Since taking the reins, Keiley has been travelling across Canada holding open auditions everywhere from St. John’s to Victoria in the hopes of bringing together a truly national performance ensemble.

“The goal is to bring together a 10-person ensemble of artists from across the country,” she says. “They’ll form the backbone of the company next year … the goal is to find people who are great for [next season’s] shows, and shows that are great for these actors.” (The 2013-14 season will be announced in April. The only hint that Keiley will offer about the upcoming productions is that “these are all plays that I love and that are good for your brain and for your heart.”)

The company operated with an ensemble under Hinton as well, but they didn’t perform in all the shows. Keiley envisions that her national ensemble will become a primary performance corps.

But her national interest is in more than a performance ensemble. Keiley and her artistic associates at the NAC will be keeping a close eye on up-and-coming work from independent theatre artists from across the country.

“We’ll be trying to invest in productions from across the country that we think are extraordinary so that their premieres can be stronger,” she says. “And working with companies that create their own work … we need to be strengthening the Canadian canon. And in this post it’s great to foster other people’s work.”

Meanwhile, her immediate focus is on the water. “The water isn’t my idea,” she admits. “Mary Zimmerman writes it into the script.” She’s being somewhat facetious. Zimmerman’s script indicates a shallow pool on the stage, which is present in this production, but Keiley was interested in offering the audience a second view of the water, to better underscore the play’s themes of a “doubled world … the different people we can be in different environments,” she says.

This isn’t Keiley’s first time directing this show, either. (She did it a few years ago at York University in Toronto with a significantly lower budget — instead of the NAC’s elaborate onstage aquarium, the Yorkies made do with bathtubs.)

“Ovid just keeps coming up,” she says. “It’s like the Star Wars of 2,000 years ago — we’re still referencing it.”

Metamorphoses runs Jan. 29 to Feb. 16 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. On Feb. 2, Jillian Keiley and set designer Bretta Gerecke will participate in a salon discussing the production. For tickets and more information, visit nac-cna.ca.